(22-10-2011 05:35 PM)Saimmaq Wrote: I must say though I am really glad to have a place to just say this shite and not worry about someone coming back with the platitudes and "pray on it" crap! I am not expecting answers - I feel how I feel today, but I may feel differently tomorrow. Who can say? I just roll with it regardless!

Sorry for misinterpreting your previous post, Saimmaq, I see now that you have it under control. I am pleased that you feel at home here, lots of people who feel the same way about things and that helps -- I know it helps me.

No worries! I am not overly coherent at the moment and I got WAAAY off topic, so I appreciate the response!

(22-10-2011 03:03 PM)Zatamon Wrote: That will teach me -- trying to make an effort to communicate!

One more comment I need to make and then I am really done (without repeating myself).

This one is about options available to the individual on hearing about events like Gaddafi's death.

1. We can react with glee, hate, feeling of superiority, blood-lust for more, self-satisfied righteousness.

2. We can react with sadness, sense of human tragedy, waste.

3. We can react with desire to find out what had happened, how it happened, why it happened, who benefited, who lost, what were the causes that contributed to all of it, from beginning to the end, are we (with our huge personal footprint on the Planet and our non-negotiable life-style) partially responsible for the chain of events leading to the birth, rise and death of a dictator?

Depending on which option you choose, you will have the following results:

1. You will have the feeling of superiority, in your safe, comfortable bubble that yet another evil monster was destroyed. You will have learnt nothing beyond learning about the suppression of another symptom.

2. You will get over it in time and, in time, maybe even become immune to feeling anything at all.

3. You may become a deeper, richer, wiser human being, understanding cause-and-effect relationships in the real world, maybe even come up with suggestions of how to cure the cause rather than suppress the symptom. If you do, maybe you can convince others about changes WE need to make in order to prevent effects on the other side of the globe. If enough of you will try to do that, it might even have an effect, leading to the world becoming a better place.

And now I really think I should stop trying to pour more fresh water into the fish tank!

There is a 4th option you did not list: we could have no reaction at all and not be the least bit bothered by it either way.

Shackle their minds when they're bent on the cross
When ignorance reigns, life is lost

"What's going on, what's happening," a wounded, dazed Muammar Gadaffi reportedly asked just before he was murdered in Sirte, Libya.

The “Brother Leader” had once asked me something similar. A year after the US sought to assassinate him by dropping a 2,000lb bomb on his bedroom at Tripoli’s Baba al-Azizya barracks, Gadaffi took me by the hand, guided me out of his trademark Bedouin tent and around the ruins of his private quarters. He showed me the bed on which his two-year old adopted daughter had been killed.

With a plaintive look, he asked me, “Why, Mr. Eric, why are the western powers trying to kill me?” The answer, I told him, was punishment for shaming his brother Arab leaders into raising the price of oil and his support for all sorts of violent “anti-colonial” movements from the IRA, Basque ETA, killer Abu Nidal, to Ireland’s IRA and Nelson Mandela.

Yet he kept asking the same question when we returned to his tent while talking far into the night about subjects from Palestine to the Italian tailors he loved. Right to his ugly death, I believe he never really understood why so many were trying to kill him.

We are propping up dictators all over the world, saddle entire populations with them for decades to come and then -- and this is the best part -- we can be ecstatic over their murder and removal, before we foist another one on them to keep them down and produce our oil for us.

Brilliant plot: we get both our oil and our self righteous hard-on at the same time.